The Adventurers' Guild

Excellent work! I meanwhile finished coding a class for D64 images, so we can do anything we like to D64 images from VB applications. Now lets see how much of BT2 is hardcoded and how much we can make editable, as soon as all files are identified. I doubt that the major files would look that much different from BT1, in particular maps for cities and dungeons and events. I hope that gfx and sound and items, spells and monsters are a bit easier to manipulate than in BT1. We will see..

That's great. So will I need a copy of Visual Basic then?

Are we decided to go with the BTII engine then?

Well... no.

First of all we need to see whether or not we can start using files instead of track+sectors for the rest of the game. Then we need to see what is separate modules of BT II and what is not (= what Zerozero described above). If the same restrictions goes for both BT I and BT II, we will most probably go for both - you simply choose which engine you want to work with in the editor. As far as I can determine now, the engines are 80% identical - adapting an editor to one or the other engine is a matter of a setting. What is the point of limiting yourself to one of them, when you really could do an editor for both just as easy?

What we need right now is a solid confirmation that the BT II engine is usable. We have come a long way, but we are far from the goal yet. I hope we can use the BT II engine. It is in many ways nicer with the wilderness and all.

But, the optimal solution would be to use the BT III engine, which we know uses scripts for everything and which can do everything its predecessors can do - and more. To be able to use the BT III engine someone (probably I) need to dive into ways of extracting files from Prodos 2.0 encapsuled in D64 images. Not my idea of a fun saturday night. I will probably need help from more experienced crackers to do this - but there is noone that ever have been looking into it.

Darendor wrote:So the track/sector tables for the city disk allow us to reorganize the cities then.

Pretty much. And it also allows us to easier extract and examine all the images, all events and the rest of the fun stuff. But most importantly - we know what files are "real" files used by the engine - this way we can turn these files into visible, encoded and loadable files. We can sort out stuff and learn how much space there is left on the disk.

Dang man get online more often...lol... and read this... the BT3 boot disk pretty much is organized like just that

http://apple2.info/wiki/index.php?title ... dard_Files

EDIT

I am starting to write a ProDOS emulator for D64 images.
 
 

Things are getting pretty exciting around here!

A nice thing with an emulated Prodos for D64 images is not only that the files for BT III are becoming accessable. This opens up the possibility to make nice versions of Wasteland and Dragon Wars aswell - both adorable games and very nice RPG's.

I'll leave it to you two to work out the details on this, as my technical knowledge in this area is sadly quite limited.

 
 

Just a brief update:

I am making great progress in understanding the C64 ProDOS version and am positive to read and write files soon. If I only had more time...
 
 

(2009-04-17 00:40:46) Dwalin: very big progress, we will be able to use BT3.

Damn nice message I recieved yesterday, isn't it?

Lol... well to be precise: we will be able to read and write that prodos, but will we be also able to interpret that files it uses? We decoded pretty much of BT1 and that includes pretty much of BT2. But I am positive we will make that too, and that would mean, that you later can also try to decipher the Wasteland and Dragon Wars disks.

I have no interest in Dragon Wars or Wasteland.

And who is this Dwalin person?

We should all gather everyone together in one venue.

Well, I for one have an interest in Dragon Wars.

I have no interest in Dragon Wars or Wasteland.
And who is this Dwalin person?

Dwalin? That's ZeroZero on ICQ.

Dragon Wars and Wasteland are just neat bonuses for the C-64 community, as Zerozero's work will open up for optimizing and reinvestigating these games. I don't mean this community, but rather oldie Commodore 64 groups like Nostalgia and Hokuto Force - they will most likely take a look at the revealed treasures.